A commercial wholetrain, with an adhesive design of the urban artist Shepard ‘Obey’ Fairey, who recycles socialist movement graphics from the past for his succesful imagery.

What a powerful statement for 21st century Berlin: this is the kind of art that is wanted here, playful and ignorant mixing of historical aesthetics, peel-off muralism as a train advertising. Funded by tax money.

Read on the Sh.I. blog

“The look of performative guilt on the Cambridge Analytica dude’s face in every photo is the biggest giveaway of his obvious expectation to be given the Chelsea Manning or Snowden treatment despite the fact that everything he says indicates the whole episode has been a game to him“ Toby Shorin

Why the app cult has to be stopped, for si-blog.net:

To sum up the privacy problem of social media: Users give access to their data and to the data of their „friends“ by using all these little tests and games, the so called „apps“. The way these apps are marketed you can‘t decide what to share, you get a „free“ product in exchange for data. You can only click accept on the whole access bundle. The only way to „cheat“ this should be to run apps in a sandbox.

From the side of the host (in this case facebook) no controlling contracts for this procedure exists, once the third parties have the data they do whatever they want with it. Because you know, the user accepted this by clicking accept on a free app that only has an accept button and no room for selection access options. It is a deal between user and third party. The conditions of this deal are highly problematic! It is neither facebook selling your data, nor a data breach, just a deal with really bad conditions, your and your network’s data in exchange for some code. This marketing scheme is pushed by all the tech companies that constitute the app cult, be it Google Play, App Store, Windows Apps, Facebook Apps, Twitter Apps.

This company „Cambridge Analytica“ that is currently discussed had users take psychological tests and give access to their friends data. This data then is very useful to run a campaign, because your advertising/propaganda will be highly individually targeted. Don‘t believe the hype around Cambridge Analytica. Their psycho-cyber-warfare phantasies are not the real danger. Changing ways of marketing software are.

In the end facebook and the other tech companies are to blame for this app system. They completely took away from users the possibility to choose what to share. The current contracting system is: you get this for free, in a full exchange for all this third-party service decided.

After Artistic value in digital communication (2016), here’s a new essay over at Shades Magazine on value in the digital sphere, on the economy of the free* services (*paid for by the digital labour performed by the users).

Excerpt:

how to organise the users that are facing the most powerful treat: things that cost somethings are given apparently for free, by rendering the work invisible. We should re-introduce the clock in order to arm the people for the battles around their time. To feel the pain of a calculated life instead of staring at the feed, necessitates to calculate your efforts, and organize with others in order to organise the shaping of the world and life, to re-enter the flow and to hack the feed. We don’t need free culture, we need to renogotiate the value of the work that is done and identify the modes of profit that are behind all that appears free.

Read it here.

But the Φ spiral gains a special potentiality on the feed. Users move along the feed, casually examining what passes by, a bit like passengers on a train looking out the window and non-reading the graffiti along the train line. The eye jumps from post to post, while the content scrolls. The spiral on and in the image is a counter movement to this. It guides the eye movement back into the feed, a bit like clickbait headlines want to draw you behind or beyond the feed. A contrast to the 1960s Yarbus study about eye-movements according to how tasks guide the visual search process when we encounter images. We search along the feed, and are derailed and led along a harmonic structure through an image. And the fact that we now all know the harmonic structure, the Φ spiral, helps to have us seduced.

The Φ spiral is a very potent graffiti, it goes back beyond the lettrism of writing vandalism, back to the pure art of vandalism, the scratching of lines in walls. A spiral line is carved digitally in the images.

--
This note on golden ratio spiral memes was written for the phi pavillon of the wrong biennale 2017.

Identität und Reue sind fest verbunden. Das Subjekt findet sich in einer Krise angesichts der Brüche der Geradlinigkeit der Individualgeschichte. Der Machtmechanismus der Identifizierung kontrolliert die Vierdimensionalität der Identität: das Bild, die Bewegung, die Geschichte. Exemplarisch also: die fotografischen bildgebenden Verfahren machen aus Situationen nicht nur spektakuläre Repräsentationen (zusätzlich verewigt und verteilt im Netz) sondern erzeugen Reue.

_____________________
Siehe auch:

Was üben wir, wenn wir die die Kameras und mobilen Bildschirme aus der Gleichung nehmen? Zum Beispiel Gesichtlichtkeit*:

There is a notable difference between raves where people touch your face and try to force your mouth in the shape of a smile because they just need THAT SMILEY everywhere, that terror sign, one of the „signs of techno“ that Katja Diefenbach mentioned. And other raves where they celebrate the joy in the trenches of the landscape of my face. Everyone: Take off your faces, go out, take it all in! And once you loose the signification of the face, your whole body becomes a face.

Dark Surfaces

*„Heureux celui que l’écœurement des visages vides et satisfaits décide à se couvrir lui-même du masque : il retrouvera le premier l’ivresse orageuse de tout ce qui danse à mort sur la cataracte du temps. Il apercevra que les réponses n’étaient comme des os rongés jetés aux chiens que les formules propres à maintenir l’esclavage paisible du travail.“ Georges Bataille, Le Masque
[Rough translation: Happy is he who’s own disgust for the empty and satisfied faces leads him to cover himself with a mask: he will be the first to rediscover the stormy euphoria of all those who dance to death on the cataract of time. He sees that answers one gets are just like bones thrown at dogs, a process that makes you function in the slavery of work.]

- Reader Interfaciality
- Queering faciality

Es wird wieder gebloggt, es wird darüber geredet wieder zu bloggen, es wird weiter gebloggt:

Warren Ellis: Reblog: the world’s most minimalist radio station

Nerdcore: Feeeeeds: Es zeichnet sich (endlich) das überfällige Blog-Revival ab

Reza Negarestani: Returning to the Age of Blogging: between formal and informal, essay-form and rambling, preaching and scolding: In short, this blog’s mission is the comprehensive corruption of the youth.

Blogs blogs blogs:

The Charnel-House
Men’s Studies
E-flux conversations
Shades Magazine
Art Leaks
Artfcity
McKenzie Wark
Prosthetic Knowledge
Open Culture
Ästhetik und Gesellschaft
50Watts

The vastness of the digital realm destroys its own restrictions. Its endless wealth is provided in the form of art, inexhaustable, this generates potentials. In that sense, the net is a catalyser for activity beyond its own media. This happens, like described above for visual art, in constantly when we encounter artistic visuality, but it remains important how consciously this is happening.

English

German

Greek

Pada dasarnya web adalah salah satu medium komunikasi kita, sehingga ini juga menyangkut aspek negatif serta kontradiksi umumnya yang terjadi dalam masyarakat kita. Ia juga dapat berfungsi dalam membangun ruang bebas serta penyebaran kritik terhadap kekuasaan yang mapan, atau juga kritik terhadap realitas itu sendiri. Sebuah ruang yang penuh dengan pengetahuan dan inspirasi. Aku menuliskan ini hanya sebagai kontribusi kecil, mungkin saja seseorang akan terbangunkan dari jam onlinenya yang tak berujung, atau ia yang telah kembali menemukan dirinya sendiri. Ini adalah kata-kata seorang muda; yang telah memiliki akses ke internet hampir dari separuh hidupnya. Menulis itu dirasa perlu, dan sepertinya sekarang saat yang tepat untuk merekam pemikiran tersebut dan melakukan refleksi.

there are also two follow-ups to that text, see this post on the shituationist institute. Also about the same topic is the text Cyberpunk is dead, from 2011, which was translated to french. „Kids this days like them lolcats“ is a mix of the comments that the cyberpunk text received, which were really well informed and much more precise. here is a list: screen generation texts.

Progress in the technology of casting allowed for the equestrian statue to rise from the ground. In the animation we can see this historical development in just seven frames.

view at Homeostasis Lab

While we agree that sometimes the outcome of the experiment are just zombies that stumble home on friday morning after thursdays rave, we still would like to ask if they are that much different zombies than the sleepy school kids on their way to class that cross their way at the metro station in the morning, as they leave and head for their respective institutions. Both in school and in the club different modes of destroying and evolving your mind and the rest of you can be imagined and are performed, that’s all.

read: 5 years of shituationism

Nach den Konzepten Wagenburg, Strandbar, Mediaspree und Megaspree, ist die neue Runde der Auseinandersetzung um die Ästhetik der inneren Spree eingeläutet. Falls es jemanden interessiert, ich bin ja Fan des Uferwegs (beispielhaft rudimentär am Verdi-Gebäude umgesetzt), erinnert mich an das Pariser Seine-Ufer.  An den Berges de Seine als ein wirklich nutzbarer öffentlicher Raum modernisiert, als abgetrennte Ebene unterhalb des Verkehrsraums ein ruhiger Ort am Fluß zum gemeinsamen Verweilen, dort finden dann hin und wieder geförderte kostenlose Konzerte statt. Ein riesen Unterschied sowohl zu der Touristenschleuse an der Eastside-Gallery, und dem daneben anliegenden Werbetafelhafen, als auch zu den Uferpfaden die sich durch die Möhrchenparkkiosklandschaft und die Bürogebäude schlängeln sollen. Und die Clubs in Paris sind einfach auf Boote ein Stück den Fluß runter verfrachtet, als Partymeile am Port de la Gare und Port De La Rapée, am Ufer davor eine ausgelassen trashige Stimmung wie an der Revaler Straße, weil ja viele feiern möchten, aber nicht alle den Eintritt zahlen können.